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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "prizes"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Fri, 15 May 2015 01:05:08 PDTUK Government Review Says Use Prizes, Not Patents, To Produce Much-Needed New AntibioticsGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150514/09341830995/uk-government-review-says-use-prizes-not-patents-to-produce-much-needed-new-antibiotics.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150514/09341830995/uk-government-review-says-use-prizes-not-patents-to-produce-much-needed-new-antibiotics.shtml
A couple of years ago we wrote about how the patent system creates perverse incentives for companies that make antibiotics to exploit them as fully as possible while they are still under patent. That, in its turn, drives antibiotic resistance, which is becoming an extremely serious problem. At the end of our previous post, we noted that this situation would be a perfect opportunity to try something different, such as offering some form of prize to pharmaceutical companies that come up with new antibiotics. Remarkably, the UK government's Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (pdf) has just suggested exactly that:

we want to make antibiotics R&D commercially sustainable so that the field can attract the best minds from research organisations, small biotech companies, large firms or not-for-profit entities. To do that we propose a system by which a global organisation has the authority and resources to commit lump-sum payments to successful drug developers. Payment would have to be set against selective criteria agreed in advance. Such an approach would 'de-link' the profitability of a drug from its volume of sales, supporting conservation goals by eliminating the commercial imperative for a drug company to sell new antibiotics in large quantities -- a key factor in contributing to the development and spread of resistance.

As that notes, the key to this approach is to "de-link" profitability from sales volume so there is no business pressure to over-use new antibiotics. One way to do that is to offer not a patent, but a hefty lump sum to any company that comes up with a new antibiotic. Another benefit is that the scale of the money on offer -- around $2 billion per new antibiotic -- is likely to encourage participation from companies all around the world, especially startups, since the scheme would be open to all. The UK review suggests supporting innovative approaches directly:

A global AMR [antimicrobial resistance] Innovation Fund of around 2 billion USD over 5 years would help boost funding for blue-sky research into drugs and diagnostics, and get more good ideas off the ground. Big pharma should have a role in paying for this innovation fund: it needs to look beyond short-term assessments of profit and loss, and act with ‘enlightened self-interest’ in tackling AMR, recognising that it has a long term commercial imperative to having effective antibiotics, as well as a moral one.

The 44-page document goes into more detail about the thinking behind the proposed scheme, how it might be implemented in practice, and the problems it would face. It's a bold approach, but given the continuing failure of the current patent-based system to come up with new antibiotics, it's one that governments around the world need to consider seriously. After all, as the review warns:

if we fail to act on AMR, then an additional 10 million lives would be lost each year to drug-resistant strains of malaria, HIV, TB, and certain bacterial infections by 2050, at a cost to the world economy of 100 trillion USD.

Compared to that figure, the few tens of billions of dollars needed to implement the new approach has to be a bargain.

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]]>or-it-will-cost-us-$100-trillionhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20150514/09341830995Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:00:00 PDTDailyDirt: Scientists, You Too Can Be Rich And Famous!Joyce Hunghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110603/04035614542/dailydirt-science-prizes.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110603/04035614542/dailydirt-science-prizes.shtmlkids these days are more familiar with Mark Zuckerberg than they are with Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, or Isaac Newton. So, what better way to inspire and encourage scientists than to recognize and reward them for their innovative work with huge cash prizes? Here are just a few examples of some lucrative science prizes that are being awarded to exceptional researchers.

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110603/04035614542Thu, 4 Apr 2013 03:44:54 PDTFTC Awards $50,000 Prize For Ideas On Killing RobocallsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130403/18154622566/ftc-awards-50000-prize-ideas-killing-robocalls.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130403/18154622566/ftc-awards-50000-prize-ideas-killing-robocalls.shtmldeclared "Rachel from Cardholder Services" as enemy number one -- referencing the all too common spammy robocaller scams that many of us have received on our phones. It has now awarded two $25,000 prizes out of 744 entries in ways to help block such robocalls.

According to the FTC, Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss will each receive $25,000 for their proposals, which both use software to intercept and filter out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to "blacklist" robocaller phone numbers and "whitelist" numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls. Both proposals also would filter out unapproved robocallers using a CAPTCHA-style test to prevent illegal calls from ringing through to a user.

Of course, now the followup questions: will these solutions actually be put in place and work? And how long will it take for robocallers to route around these solutions?

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]]>die rachel from cardholder services, diehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130403/18154622566Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:02:00 PSTCongress & Silicon Valley Billionaires Separately Launch Contests To Drive Forward InnovationMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130221/03362922053/congress-silicon-valley-billionaires-separately-launch-contests-to-drive-forward-innovation.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130221/03362922053/congress-silicon-valley-billionaires-separately-launch-contests-to-drive-forward-innovation.shtmlnationwide technology contest for students, encouraging them to develop brand new apps for mobile devices. The hope is that it will help more students not just learn to code, but to learn that they enjoy it and are interested in learning more and going into the technology field. While this may be a "small" program, it's good to see general encouragement towards having people learn to code at a young age.

On the other end of the spectrum, three of Silicon Valley's richest techies, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner, have teamed up for a much larger program a "Breakthrough Prize" for life sciences that will award 11 grants of $3 million each year for major breakthroughs in science.

These are two different approaches towards encouraging more innovation in technology and sciences -- one at the "low" end and one at the "high" end -- but it will be interesting to watch how these kinds of incentive programs develop over time. It would be great to also see more "innovation prizes" that offer up rewards for reaching specific goals, rather than the sort of random "we pick a list of winners" that the Breakthrough Prize functions under. Still, more incentives for innovation can only be a good thing.

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]>urls we dig uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100914/12171311011Wed, 7 Dec 2011 15:41:46 PSTMaking AIDS Drugs Affordable With Prizes, Not PatentsGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111205/02251016969/making-aids-drugs-affordable-with-prizes-not-patents.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111205/02251016969/making-aids-drugs-affordable-with-prizes-not-patents.shtml
One riposte to this criticism is that such high prices are needed in order to pay for costly research, but as Techdirt has noted before, that's just a myth. Another is that even if the system has its problems, there's no other way. But there is. In both the US and EU, the idea of replacing pharma patents with pharma prizes is gaining adherents.

I introduced a bill in the Senate that would test this new approach on drugs developed to treat one disease: HIV/AIDS. The measure (S. 1138) would eliminate legal barriers to generic competition for HIV/AIDS drugs and reward innovation directly, through a $3 billion a year prize fund.

< ...>

The prizes would be funded by the federal government and private health insurers in an amount proportionate to their share of the HIV/AIDs drug market.

Sanders claims the savings would significant: he hopes that the $10 billion US market for AIDS drugs could be supplied at generic prices for between $500 million to $1.5 billion. He also notes other benefits:

It will give larger rewards for drugs that improve healthcare outcomes and smaller or no rewards for duplicative, "me-too" drugs that are medically insignificant. It also would eliminate incentives to engage in wasteful marketing activities. Prize fund rewards will be based on evidence that drugs actually work and work better than alternatives.

Those "me-too" drugs and the huge marketing efforts that have to be put behind them to get them used instead of similar products from competitors are further symptoms of the patent system's failure to promote true innovation. The present scheme still leaves the problem of how to decide when drugs work "better than alternatives," and how much to pay for them, but at least the field has been narrowed down, which should make judgements easier.

As with his previous proposal, Sanders' latest bill doesn't stand much chance of being realized in the current political climate. But it's good to hear a US senator framing the issue in terms of patent monopolies and their distorted pricing:

The cost of the prize fund would be considerably less than the cost of buying drugs at monopoly prices.

Once people recognize that patents (and copyright) are monopolies, with all the disadvantages and abuses that implies, they might want less of them.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111014/13295416368Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:00:00 PDTDailyDirt: The Field Of Open Innovation Is Still Wide Open...Michael Hohttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110214/12450613088/dailydirt-field-open-innovation-is-still-wide-open.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110214/12450613088/dailydirt-field-open-innovation-is-still-wide-open.shtmlNetflix Prize, and generally, when there's a really interesting concept that seems to catch on, there are plenty of copycats ready to try their hand at reproducing success. Here are a bunch of open innovation marketplaces that have the same basic idea -- and there are plenty others -- but we're still waiting on one player to really stand out.

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110214/12450613088Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:05:07 PSTWinner Of $10k From Apple Hung Up, Assuming It Was A Prank Call Or A Sales CallMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110124/03243012788/winner-10k-apple-hung-up-assuming-it-was-prank-call-sales-call.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110124/03243012788/winner-10k-apple-hung-up-assuming-it-was-prank-call-sales-call.shtmlit actually turned out to be real. All I can say is kudos to Ms. Davis for recognizing just how unlikely the story was... and for then taking the second call and realizing it was actually true.

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]]>urls we dig uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101213/12505212256Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:14:17 PDTBill Proposed To Make All Pharma Patents Public DomainMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071026/024513.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071026/024513.shtmlpharmaceutical patents, since pharma is often area that's a sticking point for fans of the patent system. There are a number of reasons why patents in the pharmaceutical industry don't make sense, despite protests from many. Studies have shown that patents are actually holding back the development of new drugs, making research more difficult and skewing research efforts away from what's most important for helping keep people healthy, to what's patentable. Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, for years has been talking about how patents harm medical innovations. One of his proposed solutions is to set up a bounty system for important cures -- and it appears that at least someone in Congress thinks this is a decent idea. Against Monopoly points us to the news that Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a law in Congress that would set aside $80 billion a year to give to pharmaceutical companies in exchange for putting their patents in the public domain, in order to create competition for developing the drugs.

First of all, there's almost no chance that this proposed bill goes anywhere, so any discussion over the pros and cons isn't likely to make much of a difference. There are some interesting ideas set forth by the bill, but in the long run, it's not a very good idea and would likely fail for a number of easily predicted reasons. What I do like about it is the idea of encouraging competition within the drug space, so that the pills may be more affordable to a wider audience. Competition tends to be a good thing, and it can also create more incentives for real innovation.

Unfortunately, just about everything else about this bill would likely cause problems. It's not entirely clear how this bill gets funded. $80 billion is pretty significant chunk of change. If the plan actually worked, and created new, more affordable drugs that saved many more lives, you could make a compelling argument that the net benefit to the economy would far outweigh the $80 billion (see Murphy and Topel's research for support on that). However, it's still not going to be easy to get people to buy into it. More importantly, it's not entirely clear how you'd allocate this money fairly. Any system like this where the gov't is giving away money is going to be gamed by the pharma companies in one way or another. It'll be so lucrative that it will be nearly impossible not to have the system gamed -- especially when it's going to involve a bunch of bureaucrats trying to determine the value of a specific drug. Finally, the bill seems to be entirely focused on pharmaceuticals -- which is part of the problem today. With so much healthcare policy focused on pharma, people forget that new technologies may start to make pharmaceuticals obsolete. Then we're left with an $80 billion subsidy for an industry that should be going away. I'm all for the economic incentives that come from innovation prizes, but building a huge mis-targeted gov't bureaucracy around them seems risky. Really, it seems to just be replacing one system of gov't subsidies with a different one, and that hardly seems likely to fix the problems currently facing the healthcare space.

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]]>well,-that-would-shake-things-up...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20071026/024513Tue, 4 Sep 2007 03:46:00 PDTPrize Insurance Puts A Price On Conventional WisdomJoseph Weisenthalhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070830/074450.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070830/074450.shtmlX-Prize competition, we've seen more and more interest in this model as a way to spur innovation. However, there are still a lot of questions about the competition model, in terms of efficacy and utility for private industry. While businesses are interested in the concept, the exact model remains unclear. Economist Alex Tarbarrok relates an interesting point about how the X-Prize was funded. Apparently, the group behind it didn't actually raise the prize money, but rather it bought an insurance contract that would pay off in the event that someone actually won. And who wrote the insurance contract? None other than the established experts in the field: Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. It just so happened that these companies thought the prospect of a successful launch was basically nil, so they gave the organization a very generous price on this insurance contract. The fact that the prize was ultimately claimed is a good indication that even the established leaders in a field don't always have the best grasp of what advances are just around the corner. It also suggests a possible business model, whereby middlemen attempt to arbitrage the disparity between what the establishment deems possible and what individual inventors think they can accomplish.